Elon Musk, book reader and founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, speaks during a media tour of the Tesla Gigafactory, which will produce batteries for the electric carmaker, in Sparks, Nev., July 26, 2016.
Photo:
James Glover II/Reuters

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.

What CEOs are (actually) reading. McKinsey & Co. talks with a variety of CEOs about what’s on their bookshelves and finds that (surprise) nonfiction is the genre of choice, with most book titles clocking in at least 11 words and one colon. JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon is reading “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America," while Reid Hoffman, of Linked Inc., Cisco Systems Inc.'s Chuck Robbins, Corning Inc.’s Wendell P. Weeks and McKinsey’s Dominic Barton cite "The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks." Whole Foods Market Inc.’s Walter Robb is catching up with the current executive fascination with napping--now considered a luxury item. Arianna Huffington’s "The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time," is on his night stand.

And Elon Musk recommends a good read too. An out-of-print work by a friend of Ernest Hemingway is seeing a second life after Bloomberg’s Tom Randall asked Elon Musk what he was reading. "Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure,” tracks the lives of 12 powerful figures, from Alexander the Great to Casanova to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, “who fought against the conventions of their times, for better or for worse." “It’s really quite good,” Mr. Musk tells Bloomberg. The second-hand market for this 1929 work by South African William Bolitho is on fire. Mr. Randall writes that he bought a used copy Tuesday on Amazon.com for $6.35. The next day the price was $99.99, he reports.

Forbidden technology: Research if you dare. MIT Technology Review, with contributions of researchers, compile a list of technologies and technology questions "too hot to handle," owing to moral or legal issues and the high potential for research to degenerate into clashes between technologists and institutions. One such "forbidden technology" is literally "too hot" because it concerns the sun. The idea of solar engineering, Technology Review's Antonio Regalado writes, "is to offset rising temperatures by releasing sulfur dioxide high in the atmosphere, which will reflect some sunlight away from Earth." But small-scale tests would require releasing more stuff into the atmosphere, something that many people don't want to see happening. Other "forbidden technologies" include genetically modifying an entire species and releasing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun violence, an action forbidden by Congress.

Not another Yahoo story. There were two types of people last week: reporters filing stories about Yahoo Inc.'s acquisition and everyone else who can be forgiven for thinking Yahoo died sometime around the great Y2K panic. "Yahoo’s problem was that it was on the wrong side of the human-technology divide from inception and never found a way back.," writes the FT's John Gapper, suggesting that the internet dinosaur's roots in human curation--as opposed to the increasingly sophisticated algorithms coming from Google and the like, sealed its doom. "But technology has an Achilles heel. Although each new wave creates and captures huge profits in the early stages, when it is new and wondrous (consider the 19th century railway booms), it eventually becomes routine," he writes. Every hot technologies turns into a utility. "Unfortunately," he concludes, "Yahoo could not wait that long."